Full Metal Jacket

Full Metal Jacket (1987) is really two films stitched together, and knowing that going in changes how you watch it. The first forty five minutes take place at Parris Island. R. Lee Ermey, who plays Sergeant Hartman, was an actual Marine drill instructor hired as a technical advisor before Kubrick gave him the part and let him write most of his own lines. That section is the reason the film is quoted more than almost any other war picture. The second half moves to Vietnam and the tone drops out from under you. Some viewers say the film falls apart there. Others say that is where it finally begins. Kubrick was never making a film about combat. He was making one about what has to be done to a person before combat is possible, which is why the halves need each other. Almost all of it was shot in England. Kubrick would not fly, so a derelict gasworks near London was demolished and rebuilt as Vietnam. Worth knowing before you start: suicide, sexual coercion and civilian death are shown directly. If you want heroism or a clear moral, this is not that film. Nobody here wins.